500 Days (10 page)

“Somebody has declared war on America,” he said. “We are at war.”

This would entail a lot of actions and decisions by officials throughout the administrations. It would be demanding and involve taking a lot of risks.

“And if it comes a cropper,” he said, “I’ll be behind you.”

•  •  •  

John Ashcroft had arrived in Washington a few hours earlier aboard a Cessna Citation V. An armored SUV had attempted to drive him away from downtown to a secure classified site but was blocked by a traffic jam. The attorney general told the driver to turn around and take him instead to FBI headquarters, where he could join other top law enforcement officials in the command center.

By the time Ashcroft arrived, the FBI had culled data on the hijackers and their connections to al-Qaeda. A senior agent briefed Ashcroft; Mueller, the FBI director; Michael Chertoff, the head of the criminal division; and other officials of the findings. As part of the presentation, photographs of the hijackers were shown on a television screen. By the end, no one in the room harbored any lingering doubts that these attacks had been acts of Islamic terrorism.

Evidence usually led to decisions. But they needed to be coordinated, and a number of Justice officials were across the street at headquarters, so an order from Ashcroft went out: Everyone was to drop whatever he was doing and report to the FBI command center.

Attorneys from the Office of Legal Counsel walked over to the Hoover Building together and took an elevator upstairs. As the group headed into the complex, John Yoo glanced into an adjoining office. He saw one of Ashcroft’s top aides sitting in a chair and reading a book.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam.

Omigod.
That’s not a good sign.

•  •  •  

Alberto Gonzales’s mind was racing.

The White House counsel had flown to Washington by helicopter an hour earlier from Norfolk, Virginia, where he had given a speech to government ethics advisors. His return had taken a little longer than it might have; he overruled his pilot’s suggestion that they land on the White House lawn. That, he said,
was the prerogative of the president. Instead, they flew to Andrews Air Force Base, a twenty-minute drive away in good traffic.

A van picked him up and ferried him straight to the White House, where he was rushed to the PEOC. SWAT teams armed with pistols and machine guns lined the tunnel, the highest level of security at the bunker since the crisis began. The conference room was in an uproar, with phone calls, videoconferences, and individual meetings. Things were bad but not out of control.

There wasn’t much for him to do at the PEOC, Gonzales decided, but there were certainly legal matters that he and his lieutenants needed to tackle. He called his deputy, Flanigan, who was still in the Situation Room.

Flanigan saw the caller ID. “Hey, Al.”

“Timmy,” Gonzales said, “let’s go upstairs.”

They headed to the west lobby and met in front of the elevator. From there, they hiked upstairs to Gonzales’s office. Flanigan dropped onto a couch beside a coffee table. Gonzales sat in his usual wing chair.

“Okay, what else needs to be done?” Gonzales asked.

The two men discussed what were emerging as the key legal issues—
Was this a war? How could the country respond?
—and decided that they needed to bring in someone with more expertise.

“I’m going to call John Yoo,” Flanigan said.

•  •  •  

Yoo picked up the line at his new work space in the FBI command center.

“John, Al and I are going through some issues here and were hoping you could help us. We’re not even sure how to phrase the right questions.”

“Okay,” Yoo said. “Where do you want to start?”

•  •  •  

Over the next forty-five minutes, the three men laid out the legal framework for policies that would govern the coming war on terror.

First, logistics. Bush needed to declare a state of emergency; Gonzales instructed Flanigan to handle that. The markets were reeling and trading had stopped—should there be a bank holiday, to let the financial centers of the country regroup? Then, what about the victims? Could the president throw money to New York, without a specific appropriation by Congress? What was the scope of his power? The answer to that was easy, Yoo assured his colleagues, repeating what he had told other officials throughout the morning: In a time of military conflict, the president’s authority was sweeping.

In fact, Bush could take just about any action he wished. A war was certain,
and legal. But this wasn’t a standard confrontation, they agreed. The combatants were not part of any country; they were not soldiers whose rights were dictated by the rules of war under the Geneva Conventions. These enemies were renegades, Yoo said, like the pirates of the late nineteenth century. Their rights would be far more limited than those of a soldier fighting on behalf of an established government.

The lawyers recognized they were venturing into areas dealing directly with personal freedoms and rights of individuals. Nothing was clear-cut.

“These are the scary things,” Flanigan said.

Could the president block captured terrorists from the courts, suspending habeas corpus? The Constitution allowed for such an action only in cases of rebellion or invasion, but neither word quite fit the attacks on the Trade Center and the Pentagon. Still, if the United States declared the terrorist operation an act of war, the president should have that authority, Yoo said.

Once the United States had terrorists in custody, they had to be locked up someplace. But they couldn’t be taken into American prisons, under the authority of the courts, and then told they had no rights. The combatants, the lawyers agreed, needed to be someplace beyond the reach of the judicial system. They began batting around ideas about possible locations.

Then, a suggestion. What about Guantanamo Bay?

•  •  •  

About an hour later, Karen Hughes hurried through the West Wing. The top communications advisor for Bush, Hughes had heard that the helicopter carrying the president from Andrews Air Force Base was about to land on the South Lawn and wanted to be there to greet him.

On her way toward the Oval Office, Hughes ran into Gonzales, who had left the planning meeting after receiving a call that Bush was arriving.

The two walked onto the portico outside the Oval Office, watching the touchdown of
Marine One,
a twin turbine-engine VH-3D flown by HMX-1, an elite marine squadron. Usually, a crowd would greet Bush, but this time it was only Hughes and Gonzales. Bush stepped out, his face grim as he headed toward the Oval Office. His helicopter had just flown over the Pentagon, and the devastation he saw still haunted him.

“Welcome back, Mr. President,” Hughes said. “How are you?”

Bush nodded curtly at his aides and kept walking. The floor of the Oval Office was lined with planks of plywood, set up to hold the camera and other video equipment that would be used for his speech to the nation that night.

With his two aides in tow, Bush strode past his desk and into a small study. Over the next few minutes, Andy Card and Ari Fleischer, his chief spokesman, came in; both had flown back with Bush on
Marine One.
Then Rice arrived from the Roosevelt Room.

The group huddled around a table, reviewing a draft of Bush’s address. Speechwriters had been at work much of the day attempting to massage the thoughts conveyed by Bush into inspiring prose. Their work had been forwarded to Hughes, who did her own rewrite.

The key position Bush had expressed was that his administration would hold accountable any country that aided terrorists. As he read through the speech, he came upon the words intended to express that point.

“We will make no distinction between those who planned these acts and those who permitted or tolerated or encouraged them.”

Bush didn’t like it. “That’s way too vague,” he said. All those past-tense verbs at the end of the sentence were unnecessary. “Just use the word ‘harbor.’ ”

The phrase was rewritten.
“We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

Those few words transformed America’s counterterrorism policy into the most robust in its history. By holding accountable any governments that supported terrorism, Bush was rejecting the notion of launching only targeted strikes against criminal groups and instead was committing his administration to a worldwide campaign to eradicate the apparatus of terror.

Rice wondered whether the first Oval Office speech, coming at a time when the nation was still reeling from the attacks, was the place to proclaim this aggressive policy.

“You can say it now, or you’ll have other opportunities to say it,” she said.

“What do you think?” Bush replied.

Rice paused.
First words matter more than almost anything else.

“I favor including it.”

Bush gave her a brisk nod. “We’ve got to get it out there now.”

•  •  •  

The head of the television crew in the Oval Office gave the final countdown, dropping a finger with each second. Behind the desk, Bush waited, looking at the teleprompter where his speech was keyed up.

Just off camera, several of his aides—including Card, Hughes, Gonzales, and Rice—stood in silence. At zero, the director pointed at Bush. His image appeared on millions of screens around the world.

“Good evening,” he said. “Today, our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts.”

The victims were friends and neighbors, moms and dads, businesspeople, secretaries, members of the military—a cross section of America. They had been killed in an evil act of terror, a mass murder that was meant to panic the country. But America would stand strong. Its great people would defend their great nation.

“I’ve directed the full resources of our intelligence and law enforcement communities to find those responsible and to bring them to justice,” Bush said.

Then, the line in the sand. “We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them.”

He spoke for eight minutes. Once the camera was turned off, Gonzales approached him.

“Good job, Mr. President.”

Bush looked Gonzales in the eyes. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said.

•  •  •  

Almost two hours later, Bush was in the presidential bunker beneath the White House with a small group of his closest advisors. They had just wrapped up a meeting of the National Security Council, the first Bush had attended in person that day. Now he wanted to restate his new policies.

“This is a time for self-defense,” Bush said. “We have made the decision to punish whoever harbors terrorists, not just the terrorists themselves.”

Tenet and Mueller, the FBI director, briefed the group. Bin Laden’s fingerprints were all over this operation, but other actors may have played a supporting role. He wouldn’t be surprised, Tenet said, to find Iran or Iraq wrapped into this somehow.

Colin Powell—who had made it back from Peru—jumped in. The first diplomatic task was to confront both the Taliban and Pakistan, he said. The reasons were obvious: The Taliban was giving shelter to bin Laden, and among all nations, Pakistan had the closest relationship with them.

“We have to make it clear to Pakistan and Afghanistan this is showtime,” Powell said.

Tenet agreed. In particular, it was imperative to hammer the Taliban hard for allowing al-Qaeda to transform Afghanistan into an incubator for terrorism worldwide. The administration had to make it clear that the United States was through with them, he said.

The foreign policy implications were far broader than that, Bush said. “This is
a great opportunity. We can change and improve our relations with countries around the world.”

The United States, he said, could use this terrible episode to rebuild its relationships with the nations of the Middle East, to add another dimension to its dealings with the Russians, and to realign its approach to Pakistan.

Taking too hard a line with Pakistan could backfire, one advisor warned. Its president, Pervez Musharraf, had assumed the post in June, following two years as the country’s de facto leader in the aftermath of a bloodless coup. But his government had an uncertain hold over a fractious nation that was rife with Islamic extremist groups; Musharraf had done nothing to curb the activities of the Taliban. Quite the contrary—Pakistan actively backed the group.

No matter, Bush said. The United States was at war with a merciless enemy, and governments around the world would have to choose sides. “This is an opportunity beyond Afghanistan,” he said “We have to shake terror loose in places like Syria, and Iran, and Iraq.”

He surveyed the room with calm eyes. “This is an opportunity to rout out terror wherever it might exist.”

•  •  •  

A blanket of stars flickered in a clear Afghan sky, bathing the al-Qaeda campsite at Logar Province in a soothing spectral glow. The jihadists had come here, thirty miles from Kabul, to hide out in the aftermath of what they called the “planes operation.”

Bin Laden was both delighted by and disappointed in the results. The damage in New York shocked him. He had expected that, at most, 1,500 people would be killed. He praised Allah that the attack inflicted far more casualties. But he regretted that the second plane heading to Washington had crashed before it could hit the Capitol Building; he had been looking forward, he told an associate, to seeing the Dome destroyed.

Still, the al-Qaeda faithful at the military camp were giddy about the attacks. Sounds of singing and dancing broke through the still night; nearly everyone gathered in a single house to share in the celebration.

Outside, one man stood alone, staring at the sky. He had heard of the attacks on the radio and had been stunned that someone would launch an assault on such a powerful country. It hadn’t take long for the man, Salim Hamdan, a driver for bin Laden, to realize that his boss had orchestrated this foolish mass murder.